Along with the development of communication technologies, multimedia communications are becoming more and more popular. Using a UE, a user can make data communications with a multimedia communication system so as to enjoy more and more multimedia services provided by the multimedia communication system, such as mobile broadcasting services including Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) service.
Among the available mobile broadcasting services, notification is a very important function, used to notify a UE of some forthcoming events, such as emergencies and events related to the program content. In terms of service operation, the notification function includes a default notification service, an associated notification service, and an independent notification service. Herein, a service provider (also referred to as an IT platform) hopes that all UEs can receive a default notification involved in the default notification service. In particular, the general method for receiving a default notification is includes a UE obtaining a default notification access parameter from the service provider and obtaining a corresponding default notification message at a location specified by the default notification access parameter. For example, the location indicated by the default notification access parameter is a destination Internet Protocol (IP) port number to which the default notification message is sent, and when a default notification message is sent to the destination IP port number, the UE intercepts the default notification message.
Although the DVB-H system is more and more mature, the system has not provided a specific method for obtaining a default notification message. In contrast, the current BCAST system provides a specific method for obtaining a default notification message, the operating principle of which is shown in FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing the method of the prior art for obtaining a default notification message. In FIG. 1, a server puts an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) send descriptor into an EPG notification session and cyclically broadcasts the session. The EPG send descriptor includes a descriptor entry that specifies the location of the EPG send session and a default notification access parameter that indicates the location of the default notification session. As shown in FIG. 1, multiple default notification messages can be transmitted in a default notification session. When a UE receives the EPG notification session cyclically broadcasted by the server, the UE reads the default notification access parameter included in the EPG notification session, obtains the default notification session at the location indicated by the default notification access parameter, and thus retrieves all default notification messages in the default notification session.
Although the specific method for obtaining a default notification message provided by the BCAST protocol enables a UE to obtain the default notification message, there are the following issues:
1. A service provider usually provides only one default notification service. That is, there is only one default notification session. This requires that the default notification access parameters included in all EPG send descriptors sent to a UE should be consistent so that all the default notification access parameters correspond to the default notification messages covered by a same default notification service. However, there might be more than one EPG send descriptor in an EPG notification session, and different EPG providers may provide different EPG send descriptors. Therefore, it cannot be guaranteed that multiple default notification access parameters in all EPG send descriptors are consistent. As a result, after a UE reads a/some default notification access parameter(s) included in an EPG notification session, the UE cannot obtain the default notification message included in the default notification session at the location indicated by the default notification access parameter(s).
2. An EPG notification session may carry more than one EPG send descriptor, and a UE will receive all the EPGs provided by multiple EPG providers which will cause a rather serious data redundancy inside the UE.
3. The method illustrated in FIG. 1 for obtaining a default notification message is applied to the BCAST system. The method cannot be applied to the DVB-H system directly so the DVB-H system still cannot provide a specific method for obtaining a default notification message.
Therefore, the prior method cannot enable a UE to obtain a default notification message in the DVB-H system.